Wednesday, December 28, 2011

Here's another forgotten novel I'd never heard of, until I came across it in a used bookstore. A big mass market paperback, nearly 600 pages of tiny print, and it seemed to promise an '80s update on the '30s adventure fiction of Robert E. Howard, Harold Lamb, even H. Rider Haggard. Harold King was also a name unfamiliar to me, though it appears his claim to fame was a slew of thriller and suspense novels.

Shelkagari was an experiment, it seems, King turning out a novel nothing like any of his others, and it was a grand failure. Critics destroyed it, reader reaction was tepid (zero reviews on Amazon.com even to this day), and Lynx Books took an unusual approach for this mass market paperback edition: the first few pages contain industry praise for other King novels, Shelkagari mysteriously going unmentioned.

But here's the thing -- the novel, for the most part, isn't that bad. The first third in particular, which concerns a 1929 trek by three individuals -- a Russian jewel cutter who lived in France before moving to India, a beautiful and red-haired American heiress, and a caustic British soldier -- into the Himalayas. This sequence provided the critics plenty of opportunity to make their own Raiders of the Lost Ark jokes, but King handles the adventure stuff very well.

Yurev is the main protagonist through this section (King, bless him, doesn't POV-hop once), and truth be told it takes a while for the ball to get rolling. First we must learn Yurev's backstory, escaping from the Russian revolution, eventually landing in India, marrying a girl there who later died, with Yurev's son, during a flu outbreak. Yurev's specialty is cutting stones, and when a redheaded beauty named Abby Abbaye (!) offers him the chance to journey with her into Nepal to find the legendary lost diamond of Alexander the Great, Yurev takes it, if only to get away from the misery of living. Along with them is Jack Barbaree, who acts as guide, hiring native coolies and seeing to their provisions and etc.

Shelkagari is the name of Alexander's long-fabled diamond, supposedly the size of a calf's head, one giant uncut stone. (King opens with a prologue from Alexander's point of view, which sets the tone for the psuedo-mystical aspect of the novel.) The journey up into the Himalayas is well handled, with all of the expected dangers, pitfalls, and setbacks. Barbaree is the sturdy Brit bastard expected of such novels, and Yurev and Abby soon find themselves uniting against his acidic barbs. The whole sequence comes off like a '30s travelogue, and when the trio finally come upon the legendary lamastery in which a piece of Shelkagari supposedly rests, it gets like James Hilton's Lost Horizon.

The material in the lamastery is also well done, with legions of monks and their loyal mastiffs which prowl about the temple. Yurev finds out more about the legend of Shelkagari, how someone was here years before, unwittingly stumbling upon the info, even leaving behind unintentional clues on where the jewel might be. But due to Barbaree's treachery the trio must escape from the lamastery, leaving behind a dead high lama and a few priests.

Further Barbaree treachery ensues, and soon Yurev and Abby are alone, trying to wend their way down into the jungle-ish interiors of Nepal. After eluding a pair of tigers, Yurev and Abby "make pleasure" together, culminating a long-simmer romance, despite the fact that they both have been tramping through the wilds for the past several days with no baths or anything.

The only problem with Shelkagari is that it continues on from here. The 1929 sequence lasts nearly 300 pages, and King would have been better served if he'd just have wrapped it up here. Instead he telescopes on through Yurev's life into the 1950s: separated by fate immediately after returning to India in 1929, Yurev and Abby went on to their own respective lives, Yurev eventually owning a diamond mine in Africa.

Still obsessed with finding Shelkagari, Yurev discovers that the man who was in the lamastery years before him was none other than President Herbert Hoover! After a meeting with Hoover's wife -- conducted shortly after Hoover's loss of re-election -- Yurev just sort of waits around for the next few decades to be called back by Mrs. Hoover, so he can look through her accumulated papers to find the notes Hoover took while he was in Nepal.

Now the narrative focuses upon Miller, the son of Abby and Yurev (protagonists in adventure fiction being quite potent, you see). Abby has raised the boy to think his father was another guy who died in WWII; even Yurev doesn't find out until late in the game that Miller is his son. Anyway the Miller section is pretty boring. He too is obsessed with finding Shelkagari, having heard stories of the trip into Nepal from his mother since he was a toddler.

Shot down during the Korean war, Miller spends the next decade or so in a Chinese prison. Here King works more Shelkagari mystery into the proceedings, but really the entire Miller section seems unnecessary. After being freed, Miller soon heads back to Asia where he takes his own journey to the Himalayas, going to the monastery Abby and Yurev visited. (Funnily enough, King skips over the entire trek, which had been presented as so dangerous in the preceeding section.) Miller finds the place empty and upon return to the US goes insane.

But there's a third narrative to come. Jumping ahead a few more decades, King takes us to 1985, where our protagonists are now the grandkids of Yurev and Abby (who are both still alive, and also together, due to Yurev's wife kicking the bucket). And the grandkids too are obsessed with finding Shelkagari! Two of the grandsons unite with a woman who claims to be descended from Jack Barbaree. Amid media interest this trio goes on their own journey into the Himalayas in search of Shelkagari...and damned if they don't find it.

But the issue is, King devotes so much time to the first sequence in 1929 that these later sequences lack the necessary punch. It's Yurev and Abby we want to discover Shelkagari, not their friggin' grandkids. As it is, our now-elderly duo must stand around, waiting to hear if the jewel has been discovered. It also seemed to me that King lost the thread of his generations-spanning tale, with some of the latter portions coming off like wheel-spinning so he could fill up the interim of years before Shelkagari was found in the "present day" of the late 1980s.

Why didn't King just set the entire tale in 1929? Had he done so, I'm certain he would've not only had a tighter, more entertaining novel, but he would've had another commercial success to boot. As it is, Shelkagari the novel is now as lost and forgotten as the diamond itself.

Thursday, December 22, 2011

This obscure paperback original concerns a screenwriter in 1979 Hollywood who falls in love with an actress named Brooke Ashley -- an actress who died in a mysterious fire in 1949. The screenwriter, Gregory Thomas, soon becomes convinced that he is the reincarnation of Brooke Ashley's lover, who died in that fire with her; further, he is convinced that Brooke Ashley is out there somewhere, reincarnated just as he is, and he determines to find her. So in other words it's like a trashy romance novel penned by Shirley MacLaine.

Gregory's fiance Sharon unwittingly gets it all started; she takes Gregory to see a showing of Brooke's final film, which for some unstated reason is playing again in 1979 theaters. Watching Brooke on the big screen, Gregory finds himself crying for some bizarre reason during the maudlin finale. Soon he can't get her out of his head. He feels that he somehow knows Brooke Ashley, despite the fact that previous to seeing the film with Sharon, he was only peripherally aware of the long-dead actress.

He comes up with the idea to do a script loosely based around Brooke's life; at first he thinks maybe he'll imply that she didn't die in a fire, but then he comes up with the reincarnation premise, that she is alive out there somewhere, reborn in new flesh, and her also-dead lover is also reborn and must find her. He pitches the idea to his agent who says it'll go over like gangbusters; the agent, obviously stoned, goes further to say that Gregory should first write the idea down as a novel. This strikes me as strange, as everyone knows that Hollywood agents don't read novels. Already the novel has gone into the realm of fantasy.

Past-life memories gradually come back to Gregory. He tells no one, especially his fiance Sharon, who has become increasingly distanced from him. Sharon is jealous of the decades-dead Brooke Ashley, of the attention Gregory is giving her, and wishes he would just drop his entire script/novel idea. But after researching Brooke's life, Gregory gets deeper into it, even meeting up with one of the actress's friends: a now-old mystic who goes by the handle Madame Olga Nabokov, who acts as the novel's version of Whoopie Goldberg in Ghost.

It gets goofy when Gregory finally remembers his past life -- it comes to him in a sudden rush, all of it. His name was Michael Richardson, and he was a screenwriter then as now; in fact he wrote Brooke's last film. Working with Olga to track down pieces of his past life, Gregory soon collects a ring he once gave Brooke (another goofy moment; when he touches the ring it burns him -- the ring survived the fire which killed Michael Richardson and Brooke Ashley, you see) and even visits his mother. Michael Richardson's mother, that is. It's to Meldal-Johnsen's credit that he doesn't sap up this scene.

A horror element sneaks in as Gregory soon finds himself under psychic attack in his dreams. For some strange reason, Olga proves unhelpful here; you'd figure she'd at least teach the guy some lucid dreaming techniques for self-defense. I mean, even the kids in Nightmare on Elm Street 3 learned how to become "dream warriors." Anyway the threats continue in the real world as well, with Gregory receiving threats in the mail, threats demanding that he "forget" about Brooke Ashley and etc.

More research and remembrance and Gregory discovers who the culprit is: Brooke Ashley's mother. What's creepy though is she too died in the fire that killed Michael and Brooke. So either Brooke's mom lives on in the astral realm or she too has been reincarnated, and has continued hating Michael Richardson for taking away her daughter, no matter what skin he's now wearing. These scenes, while at first grating, soon add a layer of tension and suspense to Always, as Gregory finds himself in several life-or-death situations. Hell, even his cat gets killed. However the horror element plays out in an unintentionally-hilarious scene as Gregory accidentally runs over his enemy.

Many sequences of the novel are given over to long chunks of Michael's life with Brooke, how he met her, their dates, how they promised to be together in this world and the next, no matter what happened. Meldal-Johnsen tries to make this a soul-match sort of love, but sadly I found Gregory's relationships with Sharon and Jenny (a bimbo young actress Gregory hooks up with during a spat with Sharon) more believable. Also, Meldal-Johnsen really missed the potential for some true drama. Gregory isn't even married; imagine how much more impact this novel would have had if Gregory was married with kids. Given that, would he still try to find the reincarnation of his past-life lover?

Thankfully, Always isn't all love-written-in-the-stars romantic glurge. As was the style of the time, Meldal-Johnsen finds opportunity to trash it up with some graphic sex scenes every once in a while. My favorite such moment is when Jenny, the aforementioned bimbo actress, takes hold of Gregory's "distended penis worshipfully," says to it "Oh, lovely, gorgeous thing," pops a few ice cubes in her mouth, and then sets to work. And mind you, this is only their first date! Now that's a woman you reincarnate for.

Monday, December 19, 2011

Finally the Penetrator series gets back on track with the best volume in a long time. Mark Roberts in my estimation had been slacking off a bit in his last few contributions to the adventures of Mark "Penetrator" Hardin, but this time out he comes back with a renewed vigor, delivering a breezy, action-filled tale filled with the violence and in-jokery one has come to expect from this author.

With a nod to Wounded Knee and the American Indian rights movements of the early '70s, Terror In Taos concerns a militant uprising of American Indians in Taos; they've taken over the city in their demands for equality while meanwhile the mafia is murdering their holy men and stealing their priceless jewelry. Hardin, who we are reminded every volume is half-Cheyenne, infiltrates the police barrier and gets involved with the militants, proclaiming himself as one of them. Here Roberts serves up some in-jokes, as Hardin "proves" he is a member of the tribe by reading passages from Sapir and Murphy's The Destroyer series in the Cheyenne language.

Hardin finds an old comrade among the militants: Gil Otero, who went through Intelligence training with Hardin years before. Hardin tells Gil that he is in fact the infamous Penetrator -- which is never a smart thing for a men's adventure protagonist to do, because the reader knows well what will eventually happen to the person he has just told. (It's sort of like when Charles Bronson tells a lady he loves her in the Death Wish films -- expect a funeral soon.)

The mafia thugs make for an enjoyable cast. There's Snuffer Weiss, a little fellow given to Yiddish outbursts, Il Lupare, a hulking brute who learned English from sleazy paperbacks, and most importantly Rammer Norton, a thug whose name has been mentioned throughout the series. Norton was the guy who inadvertently sent Hardin on the path to becoming the Penetrator; a decade ago Norton was the bastard who set Hardin up for a tumble, ending a promising football career. As soon as Hardin discovers that Norton is behind the shaman-killing, jewel-stealing activities in Taos, he is even more determined to see the mission through to its bloody end.

Roberts provides a lot of nice setpieces. There's an actual New Agey mystical trip (which was the style of the time) as Hardin drops peyote with his Cheyenne "brothers." This otherwise-unrelated scene is well done, with Hardin preparing to go through the mystical rites of becoming a full-on "son" of the head shaman, but Roberts drops this storyline. Even better is Hardin's infiltration into a mob-ruled medieval castle in the middle of the desert, built there a century before by an oil tycoon (shades of TNT #6: Ritual Of Blood).

There's even a bit of "sweat mag" stuff when Gil's fiance, a Cheyenne beauty, is captured by the mobsters and taken to a secret dungeon within that castle, where she's stripped down and put on a torture rack. Here a group of "turkey doctors" (Roberts borrowing a phrase coined by Don Pendleton) prepare to make mutilated "Indian turkey" out of the girl, before Hardin of course shows up with his combat shotgun.

All told, this is just an enjoyable, well-rendered installment. Hardin is back to his likeable self, even indulging in his previously-abandoned penchant for disguise. This is another goofy but fun scene where Hardin dresses up like an old Indian so he can berate some government reps who have come to Taos to speak with the militants; one of the reps happens to be the head agent in charge of tracking down Hardin himself.

The novel ends with some unintentional humor as Hardin, flying away from Taos in his personal plane after another successful mission, already begins to plan his next mission! It's a nice way I guess to remind readers that the series will continue with more and more adventures, but it has the unfortunate effect of making Hardin appear like some vengeance-programmed android.

Thursday, December 15, 2011

This is the first Gothic I've ever read, though it's a late-era model for sure; it's my understanding the genre had died out by the mid-'70s. But regardless a Gothic is mostly what Shadow Play is; we have a willfull female narrator, an Old Dark House filled with degenerates, and even a dashing young man to save our distressed damsel. The draw for me though is the book's focus on classic film; the villain of the tale, Max Deveraux, is a wealthy film fanatic who has created his own Xanadu, where he likes to enact scenes from various '30s and '40s movies, often with bloody results.

Christine Glenville is our heroine, a film scholar who is trying to escape a messy past in San Francisco. Christine's boyfriend is a suddenly-hot director who knows of a millionaire film-fan who often funds movies. The man, Deveraux, is looking for an assistant to come out to his rolling mansion in Mendocino, and once he learns of Christine's knowledge of classic film, he offers her the position.

The mansion is massive, an exact replica of Manderley in Rebecca. In fact each room is modeled exactly after one classic film or another, all at incredible expense. (The veranda is even a replica of the one in Death Takes A Holiday; quite a feat, as anyone who has seen that '34 film would know.) And the place has been staffed with a cast of eccentrics: Deveraux's wife, who both looks and acts like Marlene Dietrich, a gaunt chaffeur who comes off like Boris Karloff in The Old Dark House, even a mentally-unstable English beauty who claims to be Deveraux's niece. And there's Deveraux himself, given to grandiose speeches about the superiority of golden age film while strolling about his acre-spanning domain.

Christine has a hard time absorbing it all. There seems to be a weird vibe to the place and lots of coy looks between Deveraux and his wife, and also the chaffeur, Corrin, seems pretty bitter about something. Adding to Christine's uncertainty about all this is the arrival of Toby, a dashing young drifter who in a bizarre scene is beaten up by a drunken older man and left for dead in the middle of the road, where Christine and Corrin later find him. (Toby's scenes incidentally are written in third-person, as are other bits in the novel, which leads to a bit of a jar as we're in Christine's first-person narration, then after a short-space drop we're suddenly in the third-person POV of another character.)

The novel takes its good old time getting to the lurid stuff, which in fact isn't even all that lurid. Deveraux enjoys recreating scenes from classic films on a stage for the benefit of his servants; the films of Josef von Sternberg are a particular favorite, with Deveraux's wife of course taking the Dietrich role. But the plays take on the air of Grand Guignol as graphic violence is added to the scenes, material that never would have gotten past censors in the '30s.

Gradually Christine discovers that she had a predecessor here, one who went missing. Of course the reader is well ahead of her and knows the truth long before Christine does: the former assistant was killed as a result of Deveraux's mad scene-playing, everyone in the mansion is friggin' nuts, and Christine and Toby need to get the hell out of there but quick.

There's a bit of sex and violence here and there but it's all skimmed over. The addition of sex -- even though only alluded to -- already places the novel outside of the Gothic, at least so far as Dean Koontz defined the genre in his Writing Popular Fiction. In fact all I know about Gothics is what I read about them in Koontz's how-to book.

I wish the classic film stuff was a bit more prevalent, but Shadow Play does at least show how the movies of the past can so affect one that it can lead them to acts of madness. As a funny sidenote, Deveraux reveals his plan at one point to one day write a book about the impact of film on culture -- Geoffrey O'Brien actually did this, with his ludicrously pretentious 1993 offering The Phantom Empire.

Monday, December 12, 2011

The Smuggler #2: Fools of the Trade, by Paul PetersenSeptember, 1974 Pocket Books

I've meant to continue reading this series for a long time now, but I've kept putting it off because it's so bad. And while this second installment is a bit better, it's still pretty stupid and ineptly written. By far this is one of the worst men's adventure series I've yet to review on this blog, down there with Tracker. And that's saying something!

Our hero is Eric Saveman, the Smuggler himself. Last time out we saw how he went from being a dope smugger to a globe-trotting spy. This volume changes things a bit in that Saveman has become basically a male version of The Baroness -- just like her, Saveman is a master of everything ever known to or created by man, and is perfect in every single way. He always comes out on top, not just when having sex, and just as in the superior Baroness series, there's tons of explicit sex scenes here, a lot more for sure than the previous installment, which as I recall was rather tepid in the sex and violence department.

Fools of the Trade (oh, what a title) though goes to the opposite extreme. Pages of graphically-depicted sex give way to moments of outrageous sadism. Truly depraved and twisted stuff which really makes the boring parts (of which there are a bunch) seem all the more boring. I mean, we have in this novel not only hot n' heavy moments where Saveman gets busy with a gorgeous lady scientist, but also bizarre stuff like where a hulking Haitian sadist whips people to death, complete with emasculating the men in the literal sense -- not to mention when he devises death-via-impalement for female prisoners...whose corpses he later takes back to his place for a bit of necrophilia.

And yet despite all of this, Fools of the Trade still sucks!! We meet up with Saveman as he's finishing his ultra-secret spy training; Saveman is somehow allowed to take part even though he isn't an official government agent and instead works as a freelance. (It should go without mentioning that he is of course that top student in his class and has beaten all past records, etc etc.) Meanwhile there's a subplot which at first seems important but instead spirals into oblivion: the government tracks its spies via a device implanted within their bodies; the technology behind this is compromised and the fear is that enemy hands will get hold of it and set off the "self destruct" mechanism which is apparently installed in all US government agents.

However the true plot concerns a handful of executives from the Canadian Spice Company (?) who are using a revolt-torn island in the Caribbean to mask their coffer-pilfering schemes (?). It's strange as hell, as the reader sets out prepared for one story but gets another, and the first story is the better one. Anyway Saveman eventually ends up on the island, Inagua, which is run by a useless local police force; the head of security is M'Bhutto, the aforementioned sadist who has brutally tortured, killed (and in some cases then had necrophiliac sex with) a few previous US agents.

Saveman is flown in by a female agent pilot who of course takes the opportunity to have sex with our boy while in flight. The average guy would be a bit exhausted after this, but Saveman's able to parachute out in the middle of the night and infiltrate Iguana. And hell, he's been here before, because he's totally perfect you see -- turns out he smuggled dope from the island back in his smuggler days. (Speaking of which, drugs are conspicuously absent this time out.)

M'Bhutto has another freelance agent imprisoned, Saveman gets caught but of course is able to free both himself and his fellow agent, yadayada...it all culminates in a lurid moment straight out of Blood Bath as M'Bhutto finds himself wearing a mask which has been outfitted with a wire cage compartment full of rats! And they chew their way through the wire and into his face and on through to the other side while M'Bhutto screams and screams, and the book still sucks!

Hard to believe, but five more volumes were to follow. Even harder to believe, I've got them and will eventually force myself to read them.

Thursday, December 8, 2011

This hefty book was first published in hardcover in 1991, then brought out in an "expanded" trade paperback edition in 2006, featuring a new appendix and fragments of material cut from the original version. But regardless this original print (shown here in its mass market paperback incarnation) is long enough, and will already be a mostly-trying read for the average reader, even if like me you're fascinated by Hollywood's golden era of the 1930s and '40s.

Film critic Jonathan Gates narrates the tale, which spans the late 1950s through the late 1970s. Gates is the foremost authority on once-forgotten filmmaker Max Castle, who left his native Germany in the age of the silents to make films in Hollywood. After a notorious, overbudgeted flop, Castle was from thence on relegated to quickies or horror films, in particular churning out stuff for Universal. He progressed through the talkie era on through the '30s, finding opportunity to instill his own art into the schlock he was forced to film. Finally in the pre-WWII years he was announced dead, his ship destroyed while he was on a European voyage to acquire funds to produce a film of his own.

Gates relates for us how he came to discover Castle's work, and this provides the meat of the tale. A college student in late '50s California, Gates begins going to The Classic, a dank little theater run by Clare Swan (ie Pauline Kael), an opinionated critic who provides copious notes for each film shown on the Classic's small screen. Here Gates encounters the nascent French film movement, all the cinema verite so popular at the time. By chance Clare gets hold of a beaten old vampire flick, an old Universal film none of them can place. This turns out to be one of Castle's many forgotten films, and is Gates's introduction to the man and his story. Clare reacts negatively and leaves all of the Castle research to Gates, who she nevertheless continues to tutor in her own private little way.

Clare has taken a shine to Gates and has made her his latest consort/pupil. After instilling her harsh opinions on practically every film ever made, Clare takes Gates to the next level and continues to teach him while they're having sex. Seriously, she will blab on and on about Sergei Eisenstein or whoever while they're making the beast with two backs. I would say this is the very definition of a bore, but regardless Gates (and therefore Roszak, his creator) wants us to believe this is a wonderful way to soak up all sorts of esoteric film lore. (But then if film classes were actually taught this way, I probably would've gone to UCLA.)

The reader must be prepared to wade through thick paragraphs of in-depth film chatter, as Gates meets one industry person after another. I have never had any love for the cinema verite of the '50s and '60s, so this stuff was hard going for me, as Gates will indulge in endless chatter with students and whatnot. Finally though he gets to the more interesting material of Castle; the best parts of the novel are when Gates details many of Castle's classic horror pictures, all of which sound pretty great. (One of them, Zombie Doctor, sounds supiciously like the real movie Island of Lost Souls -- out now on Blu Ray, by the way.)

In some ways these early parts of Flicker are fascinating because they show how simpler life is for the classic film fan, these days. Gates and his friends must search high and low for prints of the films they want to see, usually coming up with nothing but beaten 16mm chain prints that are barely watchable. Meanwhile today one can find pretty much anything on DVD -- and if it hasn't been officially released, there's always the gray market of DVDRs.

Gates finds that he and other viewers often react with horror to otherwise-innocuous scenes in Castle's work. For example Clare, who shows a particular revulsion, though she can never understand why. Gates discovers why with the appearance of the awesomely-named Zip Lipsky, a midget curmudgeon who worked as cameraman on most of Castle's films. Lipsky has managed to hang onto "uncut prints" of all of Castle's released films; Gates begins visiting the man regularly to watch them. During these showings Lipsky relates the story of Castle, how he had so much struggle in Hollywood and how he always inserted another level into his films. Producing a "Sallyrand," a "stripper" Castle named after the actual stripper Sally Rand, Lipsky shows Gates how if you look through the viewer you can see another film buried within the shadows of the main film. Gates sees grisly imagery of decaying flesh and even pornographic moments which never would've gotten past a censor, then or now.

The Sallyrand allows a viewer to plainly see this hidden footage, but to the naked eye it's invisible. However the viewer still unconsciously sees it, and this explains the feelings of revulsion and etc which set in upon viewers of Castle's work. Subconsciously they are seeing a spectrum of revulsion, only they don't realize so on the conscious level. The question remains, of course: why the hell was Castle going to such trouble?

Gates is determined to find out. After Lipsky's passing (which is unfortunate, as he's the only memorable character in the novel), Gates determines to meet up with others who worked with Castle. This leads him eventually to Orson Welles himself -- Gates learns that Welles, when he came to Hollywood with a full ticket in '39, personally sought out Castle, as he was such an admirer. The two men devised the idea to film Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness (something Welles himself did in reality), and Castle and Lipsky filmed a lot of jungle footage before the project was dropped. Welles, regaling Gates and the reader for pages and pages in Clare's NYC apartment (she's since gotten famous as a newspaper film critic), goes further to mention that Castle also provided a bit of assistance on Citizen Kane, and that he even worked with John Ford on The Maltese Falcon.

On Gates goes, searching for the truth behind Castle's esoteric work. He goes to Holland, where he meets the still-ravishing Olga Tell, Castle's girlfriend in the '30s; it was her nude form cavorting in the "hidden layer" of many of Castle's films. Roszak continues the "teaching via sex" bit as Olga, despite her vast age difference with Gates, teaches him a bit of New Agery she learned from Castle while they engage in bouts of sexual congress. Here the novel begins its gradual freefall, as Gates eventually learns that Castle's religion, which he hid in his films but still promoted subconsciously, was that of the Cathars.

Early editions of Flicker compared the novel to The Name of the Rose; no surprise that the newer edition compares it to The Da Vinci Code. For that's exactly what it resembles, only of course it's a hell of a lot more literary. As the novel winds into its third half it becomes more focused on esoteric religions and less on film, which isn't a bad thing; it's just that it sways off into fantasy, as Gates finds himself a target of a shadowy religious sect which runs a global chain of orphanages. He visits one of them -- Castle, you see, was raised in such an orphanage -- to find that the children are being taught how to edit film. The entire aim of the orphanages is to teach children how to work in film and thereby promote their cause.

Castle disappears from the novel for large sections as Gates becomes fascinated with a teenaged albino who makes grindhouse gore films on dime budgets; the kid also was raised in one of these orphanages and is himself an admirer of Castle. Finally all of it spirals out of control as Gates discovers he is in more trouble than he could've imagined, eventually finding himself a prisoner on an island off Malta; a fully-staffed island, as it were, with Gates treated like a guest. It's all just, I don't know, goofy. And you'll never guess who Gates's fellow prisoner is on this island. (Actually, you will guess; you'll see it coming miles away.)

By turns enthralling and boring, Flicker is nevertheless an interesting "other side" of Hollywood history. It is a bit annoying that Max Castle is presented as such an influential film personality (who nonetheless went forgotten), with a hand in pretty much any classic film you could name, which seems to me to take a bit from the actual filmmakers themselves. (I'm sure Ford wouldn't have taken kindly to the novel, let alone Welles.) The Cathar stuff seems a lame and unnecessary draw; easy to say in this post-Da Vinci Code era, but there could've been a more compelling "truth" behind Castle's hidden layers of film than the usual "forbidden religions" angle of Foucault's Pendulum and others.

Monday, December 5, 2011

Chet Cunningham's back in the saddle as "Lionel Derrick," casting The Penetrator, Mark Hardin, into a goofy and convoluted plot that never quite comes together.

The "villain" this time is Dr. Orlando Fitzmueller, a NASA scientist who is certain the Russians have launched a nuclear missile-firing device into space, under the guise of an innocuous weather sattelite. Fitzmueller realizes that if this weapon got into the wrong hands -- or if the US and USSR engaged in open warfare -- mankind itself would be doomed.

But when his NASA superiors refuse to heed his warnings, Fitzmueller breaks free of them and becomes a regular mad scientist, holed up in a compound in the middle of the desert. With the assistance of a sadistic right-hand man, Fitzmueller commands a group of science-type contractors who don't realize what their boss's main goal is: namely, to commandeer the Russian missile-launcher and use it to blackmail the leaders of the world into destryoing their nuclear arsenals. In other words, to threaten untold destruction in order to attain peace.

Mark Hardin enters the fray when his DC pal Dan Griggs -- who, by the way, is the man tasked by the US government to track down and capture Hardin -- gives him a call and points Hardin in the direciton of Fitzmueller. From there we have the usual method of operation as displayed in previous novels in the series: Hardin arrives on the location, scouts it out, kills a few guys, and somehow finds the time to have sex.

The lady in question this time is Joanna Tabler, Griggs's assistant; we last saw her in the Cunningham-penned Hijacking Manhattan. There Joanna and Hardin appeared to become quite serious, but in true men's adventure fashion she disappeared in the following novels. Regardless the two pick their hot affair right back up. Otherwise Joanna doesn't add much to the storyline, other than a few page-filling scenes where she talks to Griggs on the phone.

Cunningham also finally ties up a plotstrand that's been going on for the past few volumes; Sal Mitzutaki, Hardin's one-time gun supplier who tried to get Hardin killed back in Tokyo Purple, finally gets his comeuppance. This scene has nothing to do with the rest of the book, but again provides Cunningham with the opportunity to show how merciless his version of the Penetrator is.

For once again Mark Hardin is a cold son of a bitch this time out, torturing mobsters and then killing them once he's gotten his information. In one chilling scene he puts an incindiary device in the pants of a mobster -- a mobster Hardin's already been torturing for several pages -- and then runs away just before the bastard blows up. What makes it all the weirder is that the mobster doesn't believe it's really a bomb Hardin has stuck in his waistband, and so continues jabbering on as he meets his doom.

The finale is anticlimatic in that instead of a one-man raid on Fitzmueller's compound, we instead have Hardin chasing around Fitzmueller's henchmen (who have taken control of the operation from Fitzmueller; they want to blackmail the leaders of the world for money, not peace). I say "anticlimatic" because Hardin merely follows after them in a helicopter, with the ensuing air battle quite one-sided.

Cunningham also provides the expected lurid stuff; Fitzmueller has a daughter, and when Hardin tracks her down in order to get some info from her, the girl -- who's gorgeous, of course -- immediately strips down and tries to seduce him. Hardin ignores the offer; strangely, Fitzmueller's daughter then drops from the plot.

So then, it's still rocky going for this series; hard to believe that it continued on for almost another ten years. I'm assuming some good stuff must be coming along, eventually.

Thursday, December 1, 2011

This is a crazy, wild Doc Savage sort of yarn that goes non-stop from beginning to end. Anything ever said previously about violence in the Executioner books must be put on hold. Circle of Steel drips with gore, gore with no particular point. Brains splatter, intestines spill out, eyes are shot or gouged out – you name it, it happens in the pages of this story. -- William H. Young, A Study of Action-Adventure Fiction

Yep, that made me want to read the book, too!

And truth be told, Circle of Steel lives up to its gory promise. Not only is this the best Dan Schmidt novel I've read, it's also the best of the Gold Eagle-published Executioner books. True, it's yet another Schmidt tale about a squad of American black ops going rogue and selling weapons to terrorists, even financing them in their terrorist activities, with Mack Bolan again caught in the middle of a convoluted plot filled with way too many characters, but there's a crazed element here that elevates the tale, something that was missing in the other Schmidt novels I've read.

The gruesome madness begins on the opening pages, as a band of scimitar-wielding Islamic terrorists hack and slash a senator and his houseful of guests. This scene is almost a tribute to the gory splendor of GH Frost's Army of Devils. These terrorists are part of a faction known as The Followers of the True Way; they are financed by a mercenary who goes by the impressive title Killer Keller. Keller also controls an army of mercs, whom he considers his real soldiers; he uses the Muslim fighters as "cannon fodder," exactly like the character Crammon did in the much later Schmidt offering Devil's Bargain. (One could easily argue that each Schmidt novel is the same as the one that came before, with only the names of the villains changed.)

Keller's complex scheme is to train these terrorists (on American soil, no less!) to kill a bunch of senators and whatnot, generally sowing chaos, while also selling them arms at inflated prices. He then plans to kill them so as to get back the arms and re-sell them. There's also a scheme involving a group of peacekeepers on a mission to the Middle East which Keller plans to kidnap and sell to the Followers; it was all a bit too convoluted to keep up with, really. More interesting are the arms Keller plans to sell -- the M-40 Maneater, an assault rifle designed by an associate of Keller's which fires regular bullets but is also outfitted with "x-wings" of grenades. Keller has a few crates of these; just one M-40 will turn a soldier into a destructive force.

Bolan comes into it after interrogating a former accomplice of Keller's who wants to come clean. As usual in a Schmidt tale, it's not so simple. The CIA's involved, neither Bolan nor his contact Brognola have heard of the Maneaters, and Bolan is forever one step behind Keller and his men. In a way Schmidt's novels are like action equivalents of film noir, with Bolan the hardboiled hero lost in a murky, convoluted, and dangerous world of cutthroats and killers.

And, just as in film noir, there's a femme fatale -- Ilsa Tausen, a blond German beauty who not only resembles a valkyrie but considers herself one. Ilsa once worked with Keller and was also his lover, but eight years ago Keller left her behind to rot in a South African cell. Ilsa eventually freed herself and is now consumed with vengeance upon Keller; her plan (one of many plans in this novel) is to infiltrate his team and kill him. Ilsa's father was an SS officer and she wishes the Nazis had won the war. She loves to use her body to lure men into their deaths...after having sex with them. She relishes murder and gets off on it, going into combat in a "skin-tight leather combat blacksuit," blowing people away with a smile on her face. Oh, and she also enjoys freebasing cocaine.

Yes my friends, Ilsa Tausen is the greatest character to ever appear in an Executioner novel.

It occured to me as I read it that Circle of Steel isn't only an amped-up variation of film noir, but also of screwball comedy. It operates on the same principles, with our straight-laced hero Bolan caught up in a madcap world of bizarre characters and goofy situations. For example: midway through the book Bolan realizes he's being followed. He springs a trap on the pursuers, who turn out to be a pair of guys in suits and ties. Immediately they tell Bolan they're CIA operatives, trying to capture Keller; further, they're part of a tactical team calling itself Talon. Then they ask Bolan if he'd like to help. All this, mind you, before they even ask Bolan who he is!

More dark comedy ensues as Bolan finds himself working with the Company. Of course they're all rubes and don't heed Bolan's advice and so get wasted in vast numbers during the many ensuing battles with Keller and his men. Bolan eventually goes all the way to Greece in pursuit of Keller; meanwhile Ilsa succeeds in her infiltration and allies herself with the man, plotting his death. But sadly this plot is lost in the shuffle of schemes and counter-schemes, with Schmidt once again sullying his tale with too, too many characters.

As in previous Schmidt books, there's a whole bunch of wheel-spinning here. I lost track of the number of times Bolan would grimly survey events and determine to see the mission through, or when Keller would basically do the same thing. I've realized that one can't fault Schmidt and others for this; one reason Pendleton's original novels are so much more streamlined is because they were simply shorter. In the mid-'80s Gold Eagle boosted the page count of their books, no doubt to make them look like "real novels," but the outcome was that now the authors had to fill more pages. Every Schmidt novel I've read would have benefitted from being shorter.

As William H. Young noted in his study of the series, Circle of Steel is quite gory, spectacularly so. Heads explode like watermelons, intestines sluice out, there's even a full-on gutting courtesy Ilsa. And given the presence of the M-40 Maneaters, there's also room for people blowing up real good -- and yes, Bolan manages to get hold of one of them, of course showing everyone how to properly use them. Schmidt even works some sex into the tale, with Ilsa sleeping with a few men she later kills.

Despite the wheel-spinning, despite the fact that the plot was recycled from previous (and future) Schmidt tales, I really enjoyed Circle of Steel. Ironically this was the last novel Schmidt wrote for Gold Eagle for several years, but at least it was a great way to go out.